Topoi vol.3 no.se Rio de Janeiro 2007 Varnhagen in movement a brief anthology of an existence Temístocles Cezar ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to outline a life and work brief anthology of historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816-1878), who lived mainly out of Brazil. I try to relate part of his extensive work to a distant look, as an effect of his continuous movement in search of files and documents on Brazil's history and geography which were found abroad. In addition, i intend to emphasize the relevance of journeys and in locu wiews as cognitive resources for writing history in a context characterized by the emergence of history as a science and its claim for narrative objectivity and for historians impartiality. "Sir! You sent me to Paris to deal with the publication of the Historia Geral . I spent the necessary time to make myself understood with the artists and once again the intervention of the benemerito of Brazil Ferdinand Denis was of great worth. Being in France I could not resist, for a difference of hours, the temptation of visiting Holland, and each time I bless even more the moment of this temptation. I cannot explain to Your Majesty how much I acquired there, both in the archives, guided by Dr. Silva, and in the bookshops the old pamphlets about Brazil, geographical maps, the more individual knowledge of the Dutch leaders of Pernambuco, etc. Various sections of the Historia Geral will give proof of this. In Holland I had to go to Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Leyden, Delft, Utrecht, the Zeist field (where I was with Mr. Netscher), Harlem and Nijmegen. Having to leave Holland to return to Barcelona I had go by a roundabout route in order not to return by almost the same path. I decided to do this, also because of the work that was almost passing into the public domain – I wanted to go to Dresden to consult the celebrated pamphlet Zeitung ausz Presillg Landt , which cites Humboldt, and after studying it I do not doubt that I differ from the opinion of this savant and attributed it to the year of 1508, as I explained in a note. Beforehand I went to Hannover and Berlin, I was in Potsdam, I went to Prague and Vienna, I went up the Danube, to Ischel, Salzburg, Munich, Constance, Schasshann, Guvich, Berne, Geneva, Lyon, Avignon, Montpellier, Perpignan and Barcelona. All very quickly, as will be seen, and only because of my activities, and because of considering traveling in time a type of obligation”. Letter of Varnhagen to D. Pedro II, 1853 1 Varnhagen is like this, he is always moving. He moves constantly, from one country to another, from one archive to another. He almost never stops, he is tireless. Like Roland Barthes’ Michelet, he is a swallow.2 In traveling, in crossing frontiers, he sees history. However, he always has the distanced look of someone who has spent practically all his life outside his country. Being far from the nation and having the aim of telling its history; being far from the nation and having to consolidate his nationality as a Brazilian, this is the dilemma of the Varnhagenian life and work. Relating these 2 two dimensions is my objective. Relating, therefore, his life and work, since I believe that Varnhagen wrote about Brazil not only with the documentation he found and the books he wrote, but also through his personal experience of his choices and his frustrations. My intention, however, is not to write a study of psychological history, but an essay of intellectual biography, or rather a brief anthology of his existence.3 Sketching a Varnhagen in movement , in other words a summary of his constant dislocations, does not prevent me from trying to make a movement within his work, a movement in Varnhagen, risking myself within him at the paradoxical cost of possibly committing interpretative excesses or of letting myself be swept away by him.4 Exercising prudence in this reading movement is not an easy task. In the first place the actual notion of movement, both physical and intellectual, is present in Varnhagenian production: “everything that excites movement” he says citing Alexander de Humboldt, “‘the creator of the science of travel’, is wrong, whether it is a vague and instinctive forecast, or a rational argument, conducts and expands the sphere of ideas”.5 In second place listening to Varnhagen, through his works and his copious correspondence, is to listen to a discourse that comes from the past rationalized by the author; there is no improvidence in him, his polemics, although acrimonious at time, are mostly contained to the academic dispute. And even when control over the verb seems to escape from him, the attacks that he offers are in defense of his character. It might not be an exaggeration to say that a good part of what we know about Varnhagen, through his writings, is a little of what he wanted us to know about him. He preoccupied himself with his life and his posterity. This caution, however, was not only insufficient to prevent an antipathetic image being created of him but also, from what everything indicates, actually reinforced it. Nevertheless, despite his less than attractive personality, he managed to impose himself, making himself essential and irrefutable. Even for those who did not appreciate him (and it does not seem, either yesterday or today, that there were few of these people) he has become an unavoidable figure for understanding the history of history of and in Brazil. Varnhagen is a colleague Who is, after all, Varnhagen? A disciple of Ranke, of the positivists, the methodological school? Is it just a detail that there are practically no references to Ranke in his work? In which positivism or in which methodological principal should we fit him? Comte and Monod are also authors absent from his work.6 In 1878 did Capistrano de Abreu not lament that Varnhagen "ignored or treated with disdain the body of creational doctrines which is recent years have become a science under the name of sociology"? 7 While did not Gilberto Freyre consider his "infantile simplicity when he left pure historical research for the philosophy of history"? 8 On the other hand, he did not fully participate in the epistemological movement that was consolidated in the nineteenth century, an offshoot of to the philosophy of history of Voltaire, which refusing erudition, was essentially defined by its antiquarian tradition.9 Without intending to locate it in a difficult and doubtful history of influences we can at the very least state that Varnhagen shared a series of general and diffuse notions of modern nineteenth century historiography that to an extent emerged all over the place despite the identification with a determined theoretical current: in other words the one concerned with the establishment of a historical truth through work in archives in search of original documents, narrative objectivity and the impartiality of the historian.10 “The historical school to which we belong”, he declared in the preface to the Historia das luctas com os Hollandezes no Brazil, “and, as we have said at other times, is far from the one that is too sentimental, which intending to move people’s feelings actually ends up far from the truth”.11 In this set of prescriptions, the most decisive for the epistemological history of the nineteenth century was, according to Hannah Arendt, the question of the impartiality of the historian.12 And in this, despite his rhetorical effort, Varnhagen losses himself completely. The distinction between the subject and the object of the research, a theoretical principle of the emerging historical science, was a premise that Varnhagen had great difficulty in respecting. He elided it with greater frequency than is supposed and which we, at first sight, may ourselves suppose. The presence of the author within his own compositions is something that impressed us. "We narrate", he explains in the first chapter of the Historia geral do Brazil, “successes according to how they are presented to us in 3 light of documents, reflection and study; and some other time, without abuse, we take it to be our position to make those reflections that we are brought to by our intimate convictions; because sad is the historian who does not have them in relation to his country, or has them but does not dare to present them". 13 Even in his more thoughtful work, the closest to the science of history in the nineteenth century, he did not manage to hide his presence in the text. He did not even seek to dissimulate it. Thus, an attentive reader like Capistrano de Abreu warns us: "it is necessary to define the temperament of Varnhagen to properly understand his Historia geral ". 14 Varnhagen was a monarchist. Yes, without a doubt. And in his own way he was also a patriot. He was Catholic, as he was never tired of stating. His belief, however, did not prevent him from implacably censuring the Jesuits and, above all, the inquisition.15 Egocentric and careerist, although anachronistic in relation to the context, these are not preposterous attributes. Ambitious? He even had an explanatory theory for ambition, both his own and others.16 Anti-Indian and Hobbesian are adjectives that might equally fit him, although more than a follower of Hobbes, he was a critic of Rousseau. 17 Anti-romantic? Certainly not at the beginning of his intellectual trajectory. His relations with Alexandre Herculano and his collaboration with the Panorama are secure indicators of this.18 Afterwards his critical position in relation to the Indians pushed him away from the Brazilian version of this romanticism.